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1983
1982 1983 1984 Events * Briton Sarah Tisdale is jailed by her government for leaking documents about the siting of cruise missiles on Greenham Common. * The Day After and Silkwood are released. * Far Right Democratic Representative Larry McDonald of Georgia introduces legislation that would deprive any local government of Federal law enforcement and criminal justice funds if they banned civilian handgun possession. Later he gets on flight KAL 007. * Soviet Union accidently shoots down KAL 007, killing 269 pasengers. The U.S. does not retaliate for the deaths of several Americans aboard and the planet is saved from nuclear war because sanity prevailed over macho posturing. * China's population is 1,0030.08 million. * U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) establishes a Violence Epidemiology Branch. * Future British Prime Minister is elected as the Labour MP for Dunfermline East. * Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash declares independence as the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC). Timeline January * January 1: CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command) established with HQ in MacDull Air Force Base in Tampa, FL. * January 19: Klaus Barbie arrested in Bolivia. February * February 5: Bombing of the Palestine Research center in Beirut kills 20. * February 12: Darwin Day * February 13: U.S. President Ronald Reagan proclaims 1983 to be "The Year of the Bible". He will celebrate it with a new splash of governemnt spending on nuclear weapons. * February 18: Wah Mee Massacre; 13 die in attempted robbery of a gambling club in Seattle, Washington. March * March 3: Bloodless coup on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada by the New Jewell Movement (NJM) overthrows crackpot wingnut dictator Sir Eric "UFO" Gairy. Conservative alarmists in U.S. convicne themselevs that Grenada is major gain for the Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan drive for world conquest. * March 23: Ronald Reagan announces the Star Wars Program. Billions will be wasted because Edward Teller talked daft old Ron into a nonsensical technological boondoogle. April * April 18: Bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut. * April 21: Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro visits Yasukuni Shrine. May * May 17: Lebanon, Israel, and U.S. sign agreement for the withdrawal of the IDF Lebanese territory. * May 20: A research team from the Institut Pasteur in Paris publishes its discovery of the virus leading to AIDS, later called HIV. June * June 2: Léopold Sédar Senghor is elected to l'Académie française. * June 4-September 1: Israel closes An-Najah University. * June 30: French spy for the PRC Bernard Boursicot is arrested near the École Militaire Paris Métro by the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST or Directorate of Territorial Surveillance) . July * July: Israeli settler opens fire on Palestinian students at Hebron University, killing three and injuring others. * July 7: Samantha Smith flies to the Soviet Union. * July 17: Soviet KGB launches Operation INFEKTION. Begins with a small leftist newspaper in India called Patriot, which publishes an anonymous claiming that HIV/AIDS was developed as a U.S. biological warfare experiments. The claim later appears in 80 countries in more than 30 languages. * July 25: Sri Lankan civil war begins with anti-Tamil riots in Columbo, Sri Lanka, which leaves 3,000 Tamils dead. August * August 12: McMartin Pre-school Satanic Child Abuse hysteria begins in Manhattan Beach, California. By March 1984, un-trained therapist Kee MacFarlane elicits "recovered memory" evidence of the abuse from 367 of 400 interviewed children. * August 15: Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro visits Yasukuni Shrine. September * September 19: U.S. Navy bombards Souq al Gharb, Lebanon. October * October 2: Neil Kinnock elected leader of the British Labour Party. * October 13, 1983: factional in-fighting among the New Jewell Movement militants reupts into violence and popular Prime Minister Maurice Bishop is taken into custody by the tiny and poorly armed Grenadan military. * October 13: Isaac Asimov delivers "Our Future in the Cosmos" speech in the Hampton Coliseum in Newport News, Virgina, sponsored by NASA's Langley Research Center and the College of William and Mary. * October 18: Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro visits Yasukuni Shrine. * October 19: Revolutionary Miltiary Council takes power formally in Grenada. The airport remains open and all foreigners are allowed to leave if they wish. * October 23: Suicide bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut causes Reagan adminsitration to "cut and run" from Lebanon, emboldening Islamist radicals across the Middle East. * October 25: Desperately needing to appear bellicose after cutting and running from Lebanon the Reagan administration sends the mighty U.S. military to invade Grenada and wins decisively against one of the weakest militaries on the planet. They are accompanied by policemen from several other tiny English speaking Caribbean islands of dubious sovereignty and equally dubious banking laws. November * November 3: Rev. Jesse Jackson announces candidacy for the 1984 Democratic Party nomination for U.S. President. * November 13: Peace protests against deployment of U.S. cruise missiles arrive at Greenham Common Airbase. * November 24: Israel is shamed by the UN into returning the archives seized from the Palestine Liberation organization (PLO)'s Beirut Research Center in September 1982. The other truckloads of looted goods seized by the IDF in Lebanon are never returned. * November 20: ABC airs televison movie The Day After. December * December 20: U.S. envoy Donald Rumsfeld meets Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, to discuss regional issues of mutual interest, including enmity towards Iran.